President Trump loses 300K followers in Twitter purge

Twitterannounced earlier this this week that it was going to purge suspicious, locked and inactive followers for millions of its users.

As Twitter began sanitising its platform by removing inactive and locked accounts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday lost almost 3,00,000 followers while Congress president Rahul Gandhi lost over 17,000 followers.

If your account has been locked during Twitter's purge, it will remain in the same state unless the owner validates the account and resets the password. Perry remained the most followed person on Twitter following a platform-wide cull of suspicious accounts.

This change is the social media site's latest move in its war against abusive or fake accounts.

Christiano Rolando, who has one of the top 10 most-followed accounts on Twitter, lost 1.6% followers in a day from 74.6 million to 73.37 million.

The decision had an nearly immediate impact with followers of many noted Indian politicians and film stars seeing a sharp decline.

President tears into May's Chequers dealMr Khan continued to refuse to rise to Trump's taunts after the US President attacked him again on his visit to the UK. The police will be out in full force to cover Mr Trump's short visit in the UK.

Since the above tweet was published on Thursday evening, Lewis's follower count has dropped further to 363,000. Some celebrities lost the equivalent of a city's or even a small nation's worth of followers in mere minutes.

"Our digital ecosystem is being polluted by a growing number of fake user accounts, so Twitter's commitment to cleaning up the digital space should be welcomed wholeheartedly by everyone, from users of the platforms, to creators and advertisers", Unilever Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed wrote in an email to Bloomberg. "We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation", it explained.

"Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop".

Accounts are locked for unusual activity, such as tweeting a large amount of unsolicited replies or mentions.